Burn It All Down

Diminishing Returns

Wow-64 2014-02-24 06-17-22-04 This morning I am feeling absolutely horrible.  My lungs have conspired to rebel against me again, and since there is a good chunk of weather on the way this weekend, I am hoping I can get it under control before then.  Yesterday the world was all a twitter about the blog post that Blizzard was going to release at 6 pm PST…  see what I did there?  Twitter was was full of speculations of what this news announcement might mean.  Some predicted the start of Warlords preorders, but eventually Rygarius the coffee bird eventually explained that it was going to be more of a roadmap type post.  With that I believe most of our fearless brits opted to get some sleep and just check it out in the morning.

At least I am really hoping that they ended up getting a good nights sleep, because what ended up posted really did not feel like it was worth staying up until 2 am for.  Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to disparage the blog post itself, but it was not the shock and awe that players were hoping for.  For me personally there were a few things that concerned me.  Firstly the tweaking of the Racial abilities.  I wholeheartedly agree that some racial perks are better than others… however many of us chose to PLAY those races for that reason.  When this goes love will they give everyone a free racial change for each character?  Some of the racial perks that I am personally most attached to are some of the fluff ones.  For example I am still reeling from the loss of Find Treasure on my dwarves…  but not sure how I would feel if we lost Explorer as well.  I mean I fully expect to lose Every Man for Himself, but I would hate to lose the fun traits in the process as well.

The part of the post that worries me the most however is the talk of crowd control.  It starts off with the statement “One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP.”.  Now are they only talking about removing CC for the purpose of PVP here?  Or is PVE once again getting the shaft for the sake of a game I have no interest in?  I have to say my favorite era of dungeon running was burning crusade, in part because crowd control was absolutely mandatory.  Even in tier 6 gear, you needed to CC or you would die.  The problem with that era however was that crowd control was not distributed equitably, and over the years each class has gotten some form of permanent or temporary crowd control.  Problem is the dungeon design has just not required doing anything other than smashing into objects with your face repeatedly.

My hope was with the return to Draenor, and the focus on heroics as a way to gear up for raiding…  that we would see a return to this more strategic era of dungeoning.  However if they feel that Pandaria had too much CC…  and by that I mean no one CC’d anything at all EVER…  it gives me great concern for what dungeons might look like going ahead.  Maybe I am coming off a bit half cocked here, since they did qualify the statement with PVP, but the diminishing returns changes would keep a fight like the PVP encounter in Crusaders Coliseum from really being viable in the future.  The one thing I did notice they left completely off the list of diminishing returns mentions…  taunt.  This was honestly the secret to us beating the crusaders coliseum fight, that the tanks would swap off taunting the hardest hitting mobs and kite them around.  A druid taunt, warrior taunt, deathknight taunt and paladin taunt all had unique diminishing returns stacks, so we could swap targets to keep them tied up.

Burn It All Down

As a programmer, I read these changes in a completely different light… because I have been them before.  When you get dropped into a situation where you have some severely outdated code, the knee jerk reaction is to burn everything to the ground and build it from scratch.  This reaction is in part because no one still exists that remembers why the code worked the way it did.  This is what this current phase of Blizzard development feels like.  No one remembers why they had hit and expertise and all these other things…  so lets just simplify everything and get rid of all things that are not strictly needed.  As a programmer I totally get this, because it feels like they are trying to minimize the variables that they have to deal with.

I figure at this point there has been a prodigious amount of turnover in the folks that are working day in and day out on World of Warcraft.  The guy that wrote this or that code is simply not around any longer to explain why exactly he named that variable “Football” when it is just passing data around.  My fear is that in this minimalistic approach we are going to lose some of the things that make Warcraft feel like Warcraft.  I am trying my best not to fall into “change is bad” mode, but in many ways the sequence of changes feels like knocking down a 300 year old building, to put up a mini-mart.  Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe the end result will feel fresh and shiny… in the same way that Diablo 3 2.0 has felt for me.  At this point… you can just file all of this in a bin called “concerns”.

Fun With Demons

Diablo III 2014-02-27 19-29-26-32 Last night my friends and I continued our trek through the demon infested realm of Diablo 3.  The big thing we have noticed is that the game gives players insane catch up experience when the level ranges are not even.  This accounts for how I went from 37 to 50 in a night, because most of the players were significantly higher level than that.  Last night the experience curve flattened significantly, so during the course of the evening I managed to go from 50 to 58 before I just felt too lousy to continue.  As a result however I am knocking at the door of 60 and have no doubts that I will finish off leveling my monk before the expansion.  Granted most of this weekend will be spent in Tamriel playing with the multitude of folks who are getting in for the weekend test.

Diablo III 2014-02-27 22-13-29-27 We managed to get a second puzzle ring, so for most of the evening both myself and my friend Warenwolf were running around with our treasure goblin pets.  We managed to get a ton of legendaries, but oddly enough I got three different versions of the same item… the Saffron Wrap.  Apparently the game thinks I need a lot of belts… maybe it knows that I actually only have one in real life… that I keep punching new holes in as I lose weight.  The score of the night came from when we beat Belial.  There were several points through the night where we learned just how impressive “ignores durability loss” can be, as we took a number of chain deaths to freezing, poison bomberman, electrical orb mobs.  The sad part of the evening however is that I no longer have my ghostly fallen champion pet, because I reached the point where I absolutely had to upgrade out of that axe.

The Final Factoid

Well as I was reminded by my wife, today is the final factoid.  I have somehow made it through an entire month of writing these.  As a result I think it is fitting that I close this factoid off with one relating to the purpose of this entire month.  I do not like writing about myself, at least I do not like talking about personal details.  Talking about gaming is a space of comfort for me, and I have no problem discussing me the gamer…  but I always shy away from talking about me the person behind the screen.  I guess in a way I feel like what I have to say about myself is pretty boring, and the more people know about me…  the more likely they are to reject me as a friend.  I grew up as an “only child”, and we lived just far enough out of the city limits to greatly limit the number of kids I had to play.

For years I craved having someone else to be there and play with, and that craving has carried through to my gaming life.  I end up trying to collect people into my little digital family.  I have deep anti-social tendencies that I struggle with, but online I can have just as much interaction with someone as I want, but then still be able to shut down the game, or twitter and walk away and have seclusion time as well.  2013 was a year of great personal growth for me.  I completed NaNoWriMo, started the daily blogging thing and ended up losing 70 pounds.  In a way Factoid February was a way of trying to get used to opening up and talking more about myself and my life in my blog.  For the most part I think it has worked, and I did manage to complete the month writing something new each day.  There were times I had to sit and think for quite a bit before deciding what to write about, but I struggled through.

The odd thing is… it seems as though people have enjoyed it.  Looking through the blog statistics, it seems as though my average daily readership has increased a bit during the month of February.  I am not sure if this is in part because I am writing more personally… or if I have just gotten more exposure thanks to the amazing folks who regularly retweet me like @RowanBlaze and @AlternativeChat.  It gives me huge fuzzies when I see people are reading what I have written, but I have to say at this point… even if I had zero readers I would likely keep doing whatever it is I am doing.  I find the process of waking up in the morning and dumping my thoughts onto the page while drinking my coffee amazingly therapeutic.  On the weekends when I am forced to vary my schedule a bit, the day just does not seem entirely right… until I have done my blog purge.  I want to thank all of you for coming along with me on this journey.  Not entirely certain where I am going next, maybe more features…  maybe more of the same, but I appreciate that you all are on the ride with me.

Everything You Loved, Just Better

The Beauty of a Patch

Diablo III 2014-02-26 18-50-24-23 This past Tuesday we finally got the ever amazing patch 2.0.1 in Diablo 3 bringing us a slew of promised Reaper of Souls changes.  The first of these was something that I had yearned for since release…  a decent social system with the ability to form guilds.  While they call them clans, we have the basic structure now to build House Stalwart inside of Diablo 3 as well.  This was one of the first things we did Tuesday after the servers came back up, and now many of us proudly sport the <HS> beside our names.  It is funny how much more enjoyable the game is for me to see happy green spam from my guildies as they get cool stuff out in the world.  That second it takes to say the obligatory gratz changes the feeling of the game entirely for me.

Additionally there is now a functionality called Communities, which are in a sense a big chat channel.  It functions in many of the same ways as a guild, in that you can see who is online that is a member of the community for easier grouping.  My only real complaint here is that you have to manually join the community chat each time you log in.  I am really hoping they fix this so that you can toggle certain communities on.  Tuesday night we also created the Alliance of Awesome community, and it is now out there open for the public to join.  We have a few people in it, and last night I noticed that Scopique created a Combat Wombat guild, since he was sporting the <CWBT> clan tag.  So the functionality seems to be working well, sub clans but one big community.

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-25-36-15One of the biggest changes we have seen so far is that the loot is much better.  Not only do we get more usable loot, with far more interesting statistics, but since the patch went live we are seeing more “legendaries”.  Last night I found what has to be the coolest one yet.  The Puzzle Ring, when equipped summons a treasure goblin pet that follows you around.  As you kill things he runs over and “eats” any white quality items that happen to drop.  Upon eating the thirteenth item in this fashion he drops something good on the ground.  I only had this actually happen twice during the play, but each time it was simply a yellow item.  However as the item says there is a chance of this being a legendary.  At this point I cannot see a reason why I would ever get rid of this ring.  I mean even if I got something significantly better stat wise, the effect and the coolness of having my own personal treasure goblin makes up for it.  The only problem is when we fight an ACTUAL treasure goblin, I maybe… sometimes… get confused and try and attack the pet instead of the real thing.

Diablo III 2014-02-26 20-49-29-45 So the puzzle ring was amazing, but the cavalcade of awesome didn’t stop there.  A little bit later after downing the butcher, I managed to get a legendary one-hander to drop.  Now just stats alone, it was better than anything I had…  but once again it is the special effect that makes it truly great.  While using this weapon there is a chance to summon a ghostly Fallen Champion, and while I don’t have any stats on this… it happens a lot.  It took us a bit to realize exactly what was happening, but my ghostly buddy seemed to help speed up our kills significantly.  At this point I have managed to pick up better damage weapons, but I am rocking this is my offhand just for the procs… which seem to make up the gap.  At some point I will pass this off to my Barbarian or Crusader, because it really is rather good. 

Everything You Loved, Just Better

Diablo III 2014-02-26 22-44-30-56 So last night I spent most of the night running around in either a three man or a four man group.  I don’t even know what difficulty we were playing on, but I know we ratcheted up a few times from normal.  Around 7 pm I was sitting at 37, and at 10:30 when we stopped playing I had just dinged 50.  The experience gain for grouping has significantly improved, and if we do another night of this I have no doubt that I will get my first Diablo 3 character to the present level cap.  A few months ago… I was deeply uncertain if this would happen before the expansion actually landed.  Everything about Diablo 3 just feels “fresher”, like the world has a shiny coat of paint… and in part this is the magic of finally getting meaningful drops.  Also there is the side benefit that the crafting system finally makes a marginal amount of sense.  So many things have been tweaked to make far more sense… like condensing all the flavors of heal pot into one… and making them stack to 100.

I still dislike click to move as a control scheme, but it feels as though the hours I have spent playing League of Legends has improved my dexterity at doing so.  While I still die a lot to standing in the stupid…. and man we got some seriously bad combinations of stupid at the same time…  there seems to be a far greater chance that I will come through it all successfully.  There were a few times last night where I ended up kiting mobs around when I was by myself, and were not for the little bit of experience I have laning in LoL… I never would have survived.  Granted I am still pretty freaking horrible at laning, but it has made me a much better Diablo player just in the bit I have done.  Hopefully tonight we can push our little team of characters to 60 and start gaining some Paragon levels.

Belghast the Altar Boy

I was raised Catholic in a very protestant area of the world, and this was an area for confusion during most of my childhood.  I still remember one day in elementary school one of the southern Baptist children coming up to me and asking me “why I don’t believe in god”.  Idiocy like that aside, I have never been very “religious” and at this point I am not a practicing anything.  I can’t even attest to having something that you could quantify as a formal doctrine of beliefs…  I mostly just spend my time trying to be a good person… and winging it.  However as any good catholic should be… I was an Altar Boy.  No this is not the beginning of a priest sex abuse tale, because really my priest was one of the coolest people I have ever known.  He would probably be classified as a heretic, but he was the first person that told me it was okay to question  my beliefs.

The funny thing about being an Altar Boy is that forever will it color the way you feel about the heart of the Catholic church… the Mass.  Before they started with the incense crap recently, forcing to simply not attend Christmas Eve Mass… I did so every year to appease my mother…  who refuses to believe that I am not a “good little catholic boy”.  Even to this day, I can hear certain phrases in the Mass, and immediately feel the instinct to do something… like walk over to pick up this thing, or move to this area of the altar.  As an Altar Boy you learn this oddly choreographed dance to prove the priest whatever he needs before he actually needs it.  I use the term “Altar Boy” but in truth our parish was pretty progressive and had plenty of “Altar Girls” as well.  The priest claimed that we simply didn’t have enough people, but in truth I think he just enjoyed shaking things up a bit.

I really don’t miss much about being a practicing Catholic.  We were a satellite parish attached to a significantly larger one, and as such we shared the same priest.  So each Sunday morning at 7 am he would come to our church, perform mass and then return to do the several masses there as well throughout the day.  Seven in the morning seemed like the ass crack of dawn to me as a kid, and while I write each morning at 6 am… it doesn’t mean I am actually fully verbal until about 9.  I do however miss the priest, he has long since retired but he really was a deeply interesting man.  Once upon a time in another life he was a fairly successful commercial artist, working for an advertising agency.  For reasons I never asked him, he decided to give that life up and enter the priesthood.  I always got the impression there was quite a bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll… and he just tired of the life and wanted something more meaningful.  So much of my outlook on life comes from this man being the first person who told me that religion was a deeply personal thing, and it was natural and in fact encouraged for me to question things and figure out my own path.

Playing With Dolls

Goodbye to Justice

Yesterday the ever amazing Qelric posted an interesting video surmising that Justice and Valor points may be on the way out.  This of course was a conclusion drawn based on various tidbits of information that has been released over the last few days.  I don’t think Blizzard is terribly happy with the current Justice/Valor situation, but in truth I think this is mostly because over the last couple of expansions they have lost sight on why it existed in the first place.  The pinnacle of the system “working as intended” I feel arrived during Wrath of the Lich King.  At that point if you were completely unlucky in getting the right dungeon drops, you could save up and eventually buy even set pieces with this “consolation currency”.

Sure it also modified how we viewed gear, since only certain pieces could be bought with valor but generally speaking you could get a two piece bonus with the current tier without actually having to rely on raid drops.  I did not play much during the cataclysm era, so I cannot really recall how the system worked then, but during Pandaria it has changed into something mostly useless.  The gear you can get with Valor is a much watered down version of what you can get through even the latest tier of LFR.  As a result Valor has become a currency almost exclusively reserved for spending on item upgrades.  So quite honestly… I don’t think the valor/item upgrade system is really working as intended either.

I feel like right now Blizzard is going through a lot of growing pains, in part due to the fact that there has been a fairly constant changing of the guards when it comes to decision making.  I feel like we are seeing a classic case of “I don’t know what the original intent was, so lets just get rid of it.”  As a programmer I completely understand this, since if you look at some code and you cannot fully grasp what is going on, the instinct is just to gut it and replace it with something that does make sense to you.  As a result we are seeing a lot of these “re-writes” going on, tanking stats not working the way we want them… lets get rid of them.  Juctice/Valor mutated in purpose over the last few expansions… well lets get rid of that too.  I feel Justice points used to fill a niche that was highly needed in the game, so my hope is that we can return to the way things worked during Wrath.

Massive ESO Beta Weekend

eso 2014-02-17 13-53-20-16 For those who do not know already, this weekend there will be another massive beta test weekend over in The Elder Scrolls Online.  They have also announced that by participating in the testing you will be eligible for an in game Monkey pet at release.  Millions of beta keys have been sent out at this point, and most of them came with a buddy key attached.  So hopefully all of you that are reading this will be in this weekends testing.  I have my public beta client tested up and will be popping in to hang out with you all.  If you are playing this weekend feel free to throw @Belghast a friend invite.  You can do friends lists in two ways, either you can friend a specific character or you can friend the root account identifier.  They follow twitter like syntax so prepend all account invites with the @ symbol.

I believe that weekend testers will be able to see first hand the new starter experience, as well as the new collision detection.  This is something that had been in the works for awhile, but since it had also been a major weekend test complaint they were able to get the collision detection in before launch.  Essentially now you can no longer run through NPCs, enemies and other players in PVE settings.  This has been disabled for PVP however since managing collision detection with hundreds of players in the same area becomes problematic.  Additionally and some of my readers will appreciate it, what were essentially Midi tracks have been replaced with the full orchestral equivalents.  The game feels and sounds amazing.

I have a spare buddy key that I would love it to go to one of my readers.  So if you are interested in testing this weekend, and do not mind downloading a roughly 30 gig beta client…  post in the comments and we will figure out a way to get you the key.  I think most everyone I know already has access to this test, and I look forward to seeing them all over the weekend.

Playing With Dolls

Yesterday my good friend @Gypsy_Syl posted the above video to twitter in response to another friend.  Without really meaning to, she helped to pick out today’s factoid.  As a kid I played with dolls, in fact I owned a Barbie and a Ken doll and eventually down the line a Cabbage Patch doll as well.  I am thankful that my father didn’t make a big deal about it, and I obviously grew up no more scarred than any other kid is by their childhood choices.  In part a good chunk of it is likely that I was “mostly” raised by women.  My mom and dad were busy working all of the time, so my caretaker and playmate was my Grandmother, where I spent most of my early years.  Next door there was a little neighbor girl, that became my best friend and constant companion.

So instead of forcing the issue and playing Gi-Joe or Star Wars, I just went with the flow and played whatever she wanted to play.  While Crystal was not really a “doll” type, my cousin most definitely was.  So I can remember playing barbies and strawberry shortcake and whatever else she wanted to play.  At this young age I just got used to relating to women, and even today I am far more comfortable in the kitchen come holiday time than sitting around the living room having to pretend to know anything at all about sports.  While I am 6’4” and have a mountain man beard and can generally pass as one… I am most definitely not the “manly man” archetype.  So when it comes to long-term friendships, I tend to flock to either women or other guys like me that are not drenched in an overabundance of testosterone.

One of the things that frustrates me is that gender is associated with toys in the first place.  The whole topic of boys playing with dolls started when another friend, @MMOGC mentioned that it was impossible to find pictures of girls playing with train sets.  I have encountered the problem myself when dealing with Lego sets.  It is damned near impossible to find Lego sets that include female minifigs.  My niece has decided she is into lego, and while she is a huge fan of the “Friends” line of mutant minfigures… I am trying to also provide as many cool normal minifigs as I can in the process.  While they exist freely in the minifigures packs, it is almost impossible to buy a Lego City set and see a woman performing any role there.  Why can’t there be Women Fire Fighters or Police or hell… even Sanitation workers?  Somewhere over the years it was decided apparently that Lego was a “boy toy”, and while there are “pink” Legos, they simply do not have the same variety as the normal kind.  However I am still going to do my best to support the habit of building and creating things, even if it means the really cool stuff is harder to find.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

Starter Islands Optional

eso 2014-02-15 11-38-45-72 I hinted about this yesterday, but I have since checked in on the NDA and everything is cool to talk about.  Currently up on test is a number of changes to designed to improve the game play experience for those who felt that it was simply too “tutorial” for too long.  It would not be an Elder Scrolls game were it not for a prison sequence introduction.  So you still spend your few moments in Cold Harbor but instead of being deposited on a “starter island” you are deposited in the city of Daggerfall, Davon’s Watch or Skywatch depending on your faction.  Once again I use the term “starter island” but each faction has a slightly different setup.  In this city you have the option of starting quests there, venturing out into the country side to kill random stuff or going back to the docks and returning to the starter island experience.

The end result definitely feels more like a traditional Elder Scrolls experience, as when you exit the prison introduction you are usually dumped out to decide your own fate.  I will also say however that fending for yourself in Daggerfall for example, is significantly more difficult than working your way through Stros M’Kai.  I worked my way through a series of the city quests, but several of them were rather difficult considering at this point you really do not have much by way of gear having just finished Cold Harbor.  I will likely always do the Starter Islands, because I really like the experience… but for those players who were expecting a much more “manifest destiny” experience the way is now open.

I have to caveat all of this with “subject to change”, because this is still on the test servers and nothing that we are seeing is absolutely guaranteed to happen.  However the complaint about the on rails beginning has been a constant thread throughout the various tests I have participated in.  Zenimax is taking this criticism to heart and tweaking the game as a result.  Really they have been extremely responsive to critique, and I’ve watched as a number of things have changed based on tester input.  They do have a few holy grails that I wish they would abandon, but most of these are fixable with addons.  I am not a huge fan of minimalistic user interfaces, so I know I will be modding the crap out of mine to display more information more clearly.

The Market Economy

eso 2014-02-17 13-38-43-90 I recently watched the latest of Beau Hindman’s series of Gamer Hangouts in which the show focused on Elder Scrolls Online.  Actually he had asked if I wanted to join in, but since I do not have a webcam I opted out… something that should be resolved this week.  One of the big concerns late in the show was what exactly the player driven economy would look like.  While I am not auction house wizard, and I generally only have enough gold to keep my armor repaired…  I can already see that Elder Scrolls as a whole is going to have a very craft centric economy.  Firstly this game has probably the most detailed crafting system I have seen anywhere.  This is primarily due to the heavy research component in the game.  While Maevrim talked a bit about enchanting in the video, the bulk of my experience is with Blacksmithing.

As you move about the world you will get various dropped items, sometimes these items include a trait.  For example you might get a dropped axe with the word “Precise” on it that means it increases melee and spell critical.  Now you can deconstruct every item in the game for raw materials, and this is going to be key for getting some of the rarer crafting components, however there is a special kind of deconstruction you can do called research.  This allows you to learn the trait from the item, and it takes a significant amount of time…  namely the first trait you research for each weapon type takes a minimum of 5 hours, and increases from there.  Since traits are unique to a weapon type, and there are currently eight for each type… it takes an extremely long amount of time to learn them all.

What this means is that by nature crafters will be forced to specialize, working on learning the traits that matter the most to them… or if they are purely motivated by profit… learning the ones that players want the most.  So I fully expect to see people advertising themselves as a master axe-smith, or a master sword-smith… instead of a general purpose smith.  Granted the game does not distinguish between the two, and given enough time and resources the same person could learn every single trait in the game.  Additionally each player starts off crafting only their own racial style, but through the acquisition of dropped books they can learn to craft items in any style available.  So basically the ability to craft specific items with a specific stat is predictable… but requires a huge amount of work on the crafters part.

What makes the system even more interesting is that the best gear can only be crafted in certain places.  I talked about this awhile back, but this also factors into the economy.  Essentially players will likely be paying that master sword smith to go with them to some forgotten crafting station so that they can have crafted the best item for their specific chosen build.  Additionally since you can improve a crafted item from white to green, blue, purple or orange quality, I imagine there will be a brisk trade in the reagents needed for that.  Trying to improve an item with limited resources gives you a very slim chance of success… and if you fail you end up destroying your shiny new bauble in the process.  As a result players at the end of game will be wanting to make sure they pour enough of these reagents into every attempt to give them the highest chance of success.  These reagents are likely going to be among the most frequently traded items, and folks who farm them will likely be a pillar of the player driven economy.

Rise of the Trade Cartel

eso 2014-02-17 13-38-31-15 One of the more interesting things of note about Elder Scrolls is that as far as I know there is no Auction House system.  What they do have instead is an interesting system called the Guild Store.  Once you have at least 10 members (someone correct me if I am wrong on the number) you can start to list things to sell to your guild members.  Since guilds are account based, and you can be in multiple (current limit is 5 guilds) I have a feeling that we will be seeing a whole new kind of player driven economy.  I fully expect we will see a rise of large Trade Cartel guilds that allow players access to a larger marketplace to sell their wares.  This is a different line of thinking on how an economy should work, since these trade guilds would essentially be part tradechat and part auction house rolled into one.

I also feel like similar to games without auction house systems, we will see players congregating in cities offering up their wares.  This happened in Everquest and most recently I saw this happening a lot with crafters in Final Fantasy XIV.  Since gear is so granular and specific to however a player chooses to build their character, I really don’t see a huge market for “premade” items.  I think the real money will be made doing custom order crafting, and these trade cartels will be the way to find crafters for those purposes.  In every game I there have existed various groups that colluded to control segments of the economy… so it will be interesting to see exactly how this plays out in a game that supports entirely player driven markets.  I don’t really have the knack for this sort of thing, but I do hope I have some friends that do, because it will be interesting to see played out.

Of Bel and Grudges

Today’s factoid came to me in an interesting fashion last night.  I had been playing Belganon my little Warlock, and was just about to shut down for the night when I saw a shout from a player name I recognized.  He was trying to get people to run all nine challenge modes in one night for the purpose of getting gold in each.  His message was a little oddly worded, and while I doubt he intended it… it sounded a bit like he was wanting to be carried through them.  Granted my personal feelings towards the individual likely colored my interpretation.  Thing is, once upon a time I raided with him in Vanilla, and while I thought he was a bit of a jerk…  I always figured he was just mostly misunderstood.  When he came back to our server during Wrath of the Lich King, he joined one of the uber guilds at the time…  but since he was not well enough geared to raid with them, he pestered me for an invite to Duranub Raiding Company.  During the middle of the raid, he was talking in a social channel about us… and said that he was slumming with us until he could get a real raid.

I punted him from the raid and have not talked to him since.  He desperately tried to back pedal in tells, but the damage was already done… he was worthless to me.  Just seeing his name come across chat brought up this boiling cauldron of anger.  I still hold a grudge against him for his actions, and while he may have matured or changed… I will never know, because I will never give him another chance.  The weird thing is…  had he just done something that was only against me…  I would likely be waiting to forgive him over and over.  When you do something however that negatively effects a person or group of people that I care about…  my protective instincts kick in and I will forever hold a grudge over it.  I realize this is not a healthy behavior, but it is just something I have never been able to let go of.  So I have a catalog of people that have wronged my guild or my friends, and every time I see that name or someone mentions one of them this flood of anger washes over me that I have to force back down.  So while I cannot seem to root this instinct out of me…  I can do my best not to act upon it.